I've been having a fight with Max4Live recently about using midi devices. I'd like to make a gigantic patch which integrates all my control surfaces, and replaces lots of the automap functionality with something that fits my playing style better. The problem is:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing] refers to using the general population to carry out tasks, often for free. Often, the idea is that by combining many inputs of unknown or variable quality, high quality outputs can be created - either through selection or some form of organisation.

Just had my first experimentation with Max4Live, and enjoying it so far. I haven't gone in depth into the control aspects of it so far, I've just been porting across a half finished Java project I was working on before. It's a sequence completion algorithm, aimed at rhythm generation, learning from realtime input. It's relatively simple at the moment, but once it starts dealing with metric structure I have a bad feeling it's going to get a lot more complicated. I'll post it once I've got something a little bit more finished...

I'm going to spend a couple of posts talking about some techniques I've been using while building and calibrating models, as they seem to be less well known than they might be. The first in this series is Sensitivity Analysis.

== What is Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis ==

UA and SA are techniques to analyse the robustness of model outputs; that is, given a model, and certain assumptions about its input parameters (and their distributions), we would like to know how much we can trust the output. In general terms, Uncertainty Analysis gives us the amount of uncertainty (or variance) in the model output, while Sensitivity Analysis tells us how much of that variance is due to each of the input factors.

For the second time in two days, I came across the terms emic and etic, so it's time to have a bit more of a look into what they mean. This was prompted by a paper on [http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html JASSS]: [http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/8/1/4.html Agents in Living Color: Towards Emic Agent-Based Models], which I found following up on the links between [[wp:Prospect Theory]] and ABM. (Not while looking for ways to model crack dealers.)

So, it's a good time to be in the Agent Based Modelling (ABM) business. More and more attention is being given to the idea that while we have a certain level of understanding of the physical, chemical and biological processes around climate change, in order to change what's happening, we need to look at the social systems which are contributing.

Wednesday morning was the main reason I was here - the symposium on "Agent-Based Modelling of Land-use Effects", organised by [http://www.macaulay.ac.uk/staff/staffdetails.php?garypolhill Gary Polhill].